“You see a different kind of Cristiano Ronaldo when you are the manager of his team. The rest of the world has become obsessed with the image and the look of the man, or how he celebrates when he scores, or how he reacts when things go wrong. I just saw a guy who always wanted to do his best.
First of all, I never once saw him in front of the dressing-room mirror or worrying about how he looked. For Cristiano the priority was always to win.
There were a lot of strong guys in that Real Madrid dressing room – it was a basic requirement of being at the club that you needed a big personality.
Of all of them, Ronaldo and Sergio Ramos were the leaders of the team, and that meant that at times they would speak to their team-mates before games.
Ronaldo cared about the team. He liked to be with his team-mates after the game had finished and talk through what had happened – what had gone well, what had been not so good. He also liked to joke, too. We had a lot of fun over those two years. Even when you play for Real Madrid, and even when the world expects you to score every game, that does not mean that you can’t have a joke sometimes.
Occasionally when he came back from international duty I would say to him, if he had not scored for Portugal, “Hey, Cristiano, what’s going on? You went all that way and you didn’t score?” He would say to me, “Boss, don’t worry, I’m going to score next game.”
[…] He is a pleasure to manage. We all know about the work he puts in to be so strong and his perfectionism on the training ground when it comes to technique. He also understands that a lot about being a top footballer, with the demands of the modern game, is about recovery. It is what you do in between the games that counts for so much. He would talk to our medical staff all the time, he would try to figure out what he needed.
[…] He wanted to play every week and he wanted to score every week. I never went to bed the night before a match worrying about whether he was going to be ready.”
- Carlo Ancelotti, The Telegraph (June 24th, 2016) | read the rest of the article here
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